Snack Dragon Taco Shack is literally a tiny shack attached to the front of a deli on Avenue B between 2nd and 3rd. I've seen newsstands and highway tollbooths that are bigger than this shack. I guess my love of street food makes me hope that this would be good. Thus, every time I've walked by I would make a mental note to check it out next time.

With this, I have finally posted all the photos from Italy. Next up, Seoul!

Incidentally, this was actually the first thing we saw in Italy. As soon as we landed and checked into our hotel, we headed out to the Roman suburb of Tor Tre Teste to look for this church. It wasn't easy as we only had the name of the area and a picture of the church to go by. After a couple of transfers on the buses, we got to the area and just started showing the picture to random Romans to find our way there.

What did I think of it? Let's just say that I'm not a huge Richard Meier fan and this didn't do anything to change my mind.

Continuing with architecture from my Italy trip, this is Tomba Brion, a cemetary and memorial for the Brion family designed by Carlo Scarpa in a little town outside of Treviso in the Veneto. If you are interested in more Scarpa, in the Italy entry on Figure/Ground, I have a photo of a footbridge he designed in Venice and some photos of Castelvecchio in Verona. The only photos left from that trip yet to come are from Richard Meier's Jubilee Church. After that, I'll probably take a break from architecture photos and work on travel photos from Seoul that I took during a trip way back in October of last year.

I've been wanting to try the BLT "chain" for a long time now, not just because chef-owner Laurent Tourondel (BLT stands for Bistro Laurent Tourondel, as if you didn't already know that) is being praised left and right for both BLT Steak and BLT Fish, but also because the names just tickle me the right way. Such curiously low-brow names for these high-end restaurants!

Of the two, BLT Fish is obviously the one to try first since Tourondel is best known for his seafood cuisine.

Sure I love a good rack of barbeque ribs as much as the next person, but I won't say that I'm an authority on the subject. Though the situation has dramatically improved in recent years, we all know that NYC isn't the BBQ capital of the country. There are good examples to be found, but all in all, this is not the town to foster a true connoisseurship of the fine art of barbecuing.

That's just my way of saying I'm not going to break down each of the 5 'cues we sampled and review them in detail. They were all good, let's just put it that way. What I do want to write about is my experience at this event.

I'm slowly working my way through the backlog of photos I've accumulated since last October. This is the music auditorium in Rome designed by Renzo Piano. Still to come from the Italy trip are Richard Meier's Jubilee Church and Carlo Scarpa's Tomba Brion.

That's the short review. And that's really all you need to know about Una Pizza Napoletana.

By now most people have heard of Una Pizza Napoletana, the hardcore purveyors of authentic Neapolitan-style pizza (which, according to them, is the only true pizza). Their menu consists of 4 simple pies, all 12"; each priced at a rather astronomical (for plain individual-sized pizza) $16.95. That's it. Nothing else. No starters, desserts, nothing. They even have a nicely printed manifestobrochure full of dense text explaining their methodology which somehow ends up reading a little defensive I thought.

Wallsé is an Austrian restaurant located on a typically charming block in the far West Village that has been open for about five years. To be perfectly honest, and I don't mean this in a disparaging way, German/Austrian food is just not something that makes me say: "Hmm, let's have Austrian tonight!"

Well, it was a friend's birthday and he said: "Hey, let's have Austrian for dinner!" And so we went.

I was in LA last week, so naturally I had to have In-N-Out (pictured above). I've already made the claim previously that Shake Shack is better than the great In-N-Out and I was eager to see if I know what I'm talking about (since I made the claim without having eaten at In-N-Out in almost two years). I wondered if my taste memory is as sharp as I'd like to believe it is.

Every review of Annisa I've read starts with the explanation that "annisa" means "women" in Arabic, so I might as well oblige. Now that we got that out of the way, the reason we went to this place was that my date wanted to go to a restaurant run by all women. We had watched the owner/chef Anita Lo's victory over Mario Batali just a couple of weeks prior on Iron Chef America and on that program they mentioned that her restaurant is all women. Or maybe we remembered wrong as the staff there wasn't all women. [Update: I just saw that episode again. They did say she has an "all female staff".] There was a male waiter (he was our waiter, in fact... nice guy) and a bunch of dudes in the kitchen. Okay, to be fair, I don't know if the dudes in the kitchen were cooks or maybe they were just dishwashers or something, especially since I peeked into the kitchen late in the evening when the last dinners had probably been served. At the minimum I know there is one woman cook, and that's the owner Anita. She was in the kitchen that night. The point is, the restaurant is not "all women" as we had believed. Maybe they were talking about the section of her wine list that lists only women vintners. In any case, the girls in my group were slightly disappointed by the presence of boys working in the restaurant. Nevertheless, the service, from the hostess to the waiters, was extremely warm and friendly. And really, if the food is good and the service welcoming, who cares if it's men or women?

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What Is This?

Hi, my name is Liao Yusheng (in Chinese: 廖雨笙). This is a place where I gather my thoughts on stuff that interests me, including architecture/design, photography, travel, food, among other things. Well, that is the mission statement anyway.